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The posting below looks at the challenges of motivating
the current generation of college undergraduates. It is by Ian Crone,
assistant dean of students and director of the Frick Center, and Kathy
MacKay, dean of students, both of Elmhurst College. The article is from
Peer Review, Winter 2007, Vol. 9, No. 1
http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/. Peer Review is a publication of the
Association of American Colleges and Universities [www.aacu.org/peerreview]
Copyright © 2007, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
A student came to his instructor's office seeking assistance on an
assignment to create a poster presentation for a scientific meeting. In
compliance with the terms of the assignment, he used Microsoft PowerPoint
to produce the poster. As he reviewed the poster, the instructor noticed a
misspelled word.
Instructor: "Clayton, PowerPoint has a spell-checker just like Word
has. See the red line under that word?"
Clayton: "Oh, yeah. OK. I'll run it before I turn in the final
copy. Ever since I discovered spell checkers and grammar checkers, I
haven't made any mistakes on my papers. They come out perfect every time."
Certainly Clayton's understanding of quality writing is superficial, but
his viewpoint is telling: Clayton (not his real name, although the story
is true) has come to rely on technology to be his editor, doing some of
the same things that a human editor might do for him, were he to have
access to one.
Technology Improves Writing!
Clayton's perspective on technology and writing is shared by many:
professional style (fonts, special symbols, tables, figures) is much
easier to attain than in the past, thanks to robust word processing
software. Students can interact with a spell-checker, grammar-checker,
online dictionary and thesaurus to polish writing. Tools such as Track
Changes facilitate editing. Some Internet wikis now offer "versioning" ?
access to archival copies of works in progress that help teams understand
how and why they went from one version to another during development of a
large work. Tools such as versioning promote nonlinear thinking, and thus
increase the effective approaches to quality written work.
Technology Ruins Writing!
Many academics see another side to student writing, however, (1) in which
students ignore the tools that Clayton found so empowering. Instead of
well-crafted writing that adheres to accepted standards, the critics see
e-mail, chat, blogs, and instant messages that lack standard punctuation
and capitalized words. Complete sentences are as rare as misspellings are
common. To make matters worse, words are seemingly misspelled on purpose:
certainly a student who misspells "separate" as "seperate" and "sulfur" as
"sulfer" has a very different intent than one who misspells "see you" as
"cu" and "hate" as "h8". Acronyms are used with-out definition, and they
are used so frequently as to render entire passages as cryptic as a secret
code.
PowerPoint also comes under fire because it discourages the use of
complete sentences. Entire presentations often consist of a title slide
followed by 20 - 30 bulleted lists. When the slide show is distributed as
a handout or posted to a Website, readers find a seemingly disjointed list
of items that may bear only a passing resemblance to facts, opinions, or
process. There is no sense of an argument or discourse.
Linguistic Corruption?
A problem with the claim that technology "ruins" writing is that it is
based on the premise that a language can attain a level of refinement from
which it can fall. If such linguistic corruption is possible, then it has
been happening in English for centuries. Words have changed meaning over
time ("fondly" once meant "foolishly," for example), and spelling long
went unstandardized. As Sir Walter Scott famously noted, (2) new words
have entered the vocabulary as a consequence of historical events and
social movements: Viking raids, the Norman Conquest, the rise of the
British Empire, to name a few. Did medieval poets lament the loss of
grammatical gender that came with the leveling of unstressed vowels in
Middle English? (3)
Artificial attempts to regulate or "improve" language have rarely been
successful: Mike's childhood in the working-class South was filled with
teachers who admonished students to avoid using "ain't" in conversation or
writing, apparently to no avail. Esperanto and other languages constructed
for the purpose of reducing misunderstanding have also met with little
success. Likewise, managed attempts to use language to differentiate
between populations ? for example, the preference for Received
Pronunciation in British public schools ? have at most a transient appeal.
It seems that people don't mind a little linguistic corruption, and they
may even enjoy the corrupting!
Climate Change for the Language
Why, then, does technology come in for special criticism when linguistic
corruption has been going on for hundreds of years? Surely the criticism
is not belated respect for old assertions that linguistic corruption has
made the English language less expressive or nuanced, and therefore, less
useful. (4) More likely, the discomfort stems from the rapid nature of the
change: like global climate change, we are seeing time compression of
processes that previously took much longer to occur. Melting glaciers,
Katrina-sized hurricanes, and African desertification would not be
frightening if the timetable for those events was on the order of 100,000
years, but the same changes over 100 years raise alarms the world over.
Likewise, the acronyms, alternate capitalizations, rejection of standard
sentence structure, and intentional misspellings have arisen since 1995,
the putative dawn of the Internet Age - a breathtakingly brief span on the
time scale of linguistic change.
To Worry, or Not to Worry...
Just as scientists' debate over global climate change is shifting away
from the question of authenticity to the question of significance, we may
ask whether technology's effect on writing is worthy of our concern. Dr.
David Reinheimer, Director of the Writing Assessment Program at Southeast
Missouri State University, reports (5) that students do not use writing
styles associated with e-mail, chat, IM, and PowerPoint on the
University's writing assessment exam, although a few "old school"
abbreviations, such as "b/c" or "@" show up occasionally. And in an
assignment (6) for the First Year Seminar that he taught, students were
generally aware of the need to adopt a writing style appropriate to the
audience.
Students seem to be unconcerned about the demise of good writing. Instead,
the focus is on results. If communication occurs, they are satisfied.
Dave's son provided a compelling example recently, when he used acronyms
and chat language in an e-mail requesting product information from a cell
phone company. Dave's discussion with his son about the difference between
informal communication and business communication fell flat, however, when
his son received the reply in chat language! His son's point was "see, I
got the information for you!" For many students, technology-mediated
language seems to be little more than a somewhat whimsical, yet impatient,
response to the text-dependent environment in which they must communicate.
The Canary in the Mineshaft
Despite some evidence that technology won't ruin student writing,
discomfort with the language of e-mail, chat, IM and PowerPoint remains,
and it may signal a deeper concern: do we really trust our students to
exercise sensitivity to rhetorical context? The alleged unwillingness to
follow standard writing practice is troubling insofar as it bespeaks a
cultural divide in what is supposed to be a community of learners. Can we
honestly say that students and faculty are united if students are working
(unselfconsciously, for the most part) to construct their own
communication rules, while faculty are trying to perpetuate the existing
rules?
Bringing unity where division exists is never easy, but pulling back from
technology is not the answer. As we have written before in this column,
(7) students are using technology to do what they would be doing anyway;
the technology merely makes them more prolific, and the product more
visible. Rather, we should look for common ground wherever we can.
Consider the following examples:
Precise, careful writing is important to students every time grades and
assignment due dates are communicated. Perhaps grades and due dates could
form an object lesson to illustrate the need for precision in student
writing assignments as well.
Evidence abounds that 21st Century Learners (8) seek relevance in their
learning. Might it be time to abandon artificial assignments such as term
papers in favor of writing likely to actually be done by professionals in
the discipline? Not only would the discipline model appropriate writing,
but students would be less likely to buy a paper from a paper mill,
because any such purchase would have to be extensively reworked.
What Happens on the Net Stays on the Net
How much student writing is poor out of a belief that the Internet is such
a tentative, provisional place, that it does not matter if the work
appearing there is thoughtful and finished? Our students need to know that
much of the Internet is permanent, and that the decision to make content
permanent or temporary is largely beyond their control. The realization
that prospective employers, creditors, and other "high stakes audiences"
may be watching, might begin to chip away at the supposed advantages that
students find in unorthodox writing styles. Many students will, upon
reflection, want to be understood by others in the future, after the rules
have changed. You might point students to "friendly" writing Websites,
such as Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips to Better Writing, (9) which
features brief lessons and podcasts that appeal to 21st Century Learners.
It's Still Communication
Students want to construct their own systems, out of a need to be
distinctive. The challenge for us is not to impose standard writing
practices, but rather, to engage students with ideas that matter. If we
meet that challenge, students will eventually appreciate the need for good
writing. After all, there are still very few tools that surpass good
writing as a way to promote good thinking.
Notes
1. For example, the AAC&U Annual Meeting in New Orleans, January 17-20,
2007, had a session titled "Technological Literacy and the Illusion of
Competence: Or Why Students Still Can't Write," with Kathleen C. Boone,
Associate Dean of the College, Daemen College; Edwin G. Clausen, Vice
President for Academic Affairs, Daemen College; Donald N. Mager, Dean of
the College of Arts and Sciences, Johnson C. Smith University; Frank E.
Parker, Director of Instructional Technologies, Johnson C. Smith
University.
2. Regarding "swine" and "pork." The conversation between Wamba and Gurth
in Ivanhoe (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext93/ivnho15.txt)
compares Saxon and Norman words, with their social implications: the words
of the victorious Normans were held superior to those of the defeated
Saxons.
3. Thomas Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language, 2nd
Ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), p. 167.
4. One such argument is that English has lost some of its utility because
it no longer has many of its gender, case, tense and mood endings. See
Pyles, p. 14.
5. David Reinheimer, "RE: Writing Center Insight." E-mail to Michael L.
Rodgers. February 20, 2007.
6. Based on Terry Calhoun, "HIG, R U n2 CP?: The Technology Is the Easy
Part." Syllabus June 17, 2003.
http://campustechnology.com/articles/39404/, accessed March 5, 2007.
7. D. A. Starrett, and M. L. Rodgers, "The e-Dog Ate My e-Homework!" The
National Teaching and Learning Forum, May 2004, 13 (3).
8. D. A. Starrett, and M. L. Rodgers, "Don't Be Left in the E-Dust", The
National Teaching and Learning Forum, September 2005, 14 (5).
9. Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips to Better Writing, 3 March, 2007.
Digg, Inc.
http://grammar.qdnow.com/, accessed March 3, 2007.
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